This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Bob Dylan Will Have Acceptance Speech at Nobel Prize Ceremony — He Just Won’t Be Reading it
In the latest installment of the Bob Dylan Nobel Prize Saga — which, we would note, gets less interesting as it gets more unnecessarily complex — the Nobel Foundation has announced Dylan is sending a speech to be read at the December 10 presentation of the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm. Like all Nobel laureates, Dylan…
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Finally, a Judaica Exhibit That’s Actually Interesting!
Judaica, like all religious art, represents an aesthetic dilemma: Are these religious objects primarily objects of worship, or do they have an aesthetic value abstracted from any potential uses? Even if the answer is “both,” context is critical. Most Judaica exhibits that I have seen (exhibits at the Jewish Museum in Prague, or the Museo…
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Remembering Leonard of Mayfair, Stylist for Stanley Kubrick and The Beatles
How much the styles of Swinging London in the sixties depended on the creativity of Jewish craftspeople remains to be fully appreciated. Leonard Lewis, the hairstylist known as Leonard of Mayfair, who died on November 30 at age 78, was part of the mix. Raised in the Shepherd’s Bush area of west London, Lewis explained…
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Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago Many of us remember what the elections were like on Manhattan’s Lower East Side two years ago, when Meyer London, socialist, Jew and immigrant, was elected to represent us in Congress. The men and women of the neighborhood stayed up all night awaiting the election returns, and cried with joy when it…
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EXCLUSIVE: Tony-Winning Playwright Richard Greenberg Talks Baseball, Movies, Ferrante and Obscurity
Long, long ago in the era before the dawn of Trump, I ran a theater company in Chicago where I developed an infatuation with the plays of Richard Greenberg. I first encountered his work on his adaptation of Laurie Colwin’s story “Ask Me Again” on PBS’s “American Playhouse.” There was something so charming, smart and…
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An Ambitious Book Helps Jews Navigate the Complexities of Going Home
This was originally in the print edition of February 20, 1998, and was posted online in December 2016. For some people, going home is a complicated matter — particularly after a long absence. But while some journeys of return are fraught with deep emotion and ambivalence, others are more like an odyssey, an obstacle course…
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Susan Faludi’s ‘In The Darkroom’ Named To NYT 10 Best Books Of 2016
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi’s “In The Darkroom,” a memoir about her father — who, after 25 years of estrangement, contacted her in 2004 to inform her of his sex reassignment surgery — has been named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 2016. Explaining the selection, the editors of The…
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Music One of the Greatest Rock and Roll Songs of All Time was Inspired by a Jewish Bookseller
One of the Band’s most enigmatic yet best-known songs is “The Weight.” It’s in the Top 50 of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; in the Top 15 of Pitchfork’s “Best Songs of the Sixties”; and one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll,” according to the Rock and Roll Hall…
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‘She Loves Me’ Hits The Screen, And 8 Other Things To Read, Watch, And Do This Week
We hope you’ve digested all of that Turkey Day tryptophan, because with a flood of events in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, the Jewish cultural world is moving right along. As December creeps around the corner, bundle against the cold – or, if you’re in L.A., laugh at the rest of us…
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How The Klezmatics Changed Music — and My Life
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the Klezmatics changed my life. Somehow I made my way to the Knitting Factory nightclub in downtown Manhattan in April 1997 to see the album release concert for the Klezmatics’ album “Possessed.” I was there in part as a music critic of 15 years’ standing, and partly out…
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Film & TV Did Woody Allen Predict Donald Trump in ‘Bananas’?
Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House has inspired two apparently contradictory sentiments among liberals. The first is a skittishness about the future of democratic institutions and constitutional rights. The second is a desire to escape, in both a literal and figurative sense — hightail it to Canada or avoid the homepage of The New…
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